The invention pertains to a method for the motorized movement of a vehicle door as well as a vehicle door apparatus with a vehicle door.
The term “vehicle door” is understood to be comprehensive here. It encompasses side doors, as well as rear doors, rear lids, rear covers, engine compartment hoods or trunk lids. The vehicle door can be a swinging door or a sliding door. The entirety of the following discussion is about a side door designed as a swinging door, which is not understood to be limiting.
As the functionality of vehicle doors has become more and more dense in recent years, the weight of the vehicle doors has also continued to increase. A particular result of this is that manual closing of the doors, which the user performs from inside the vehicle in the sitting position, can be uncomfortable depending on the respective geometric conditions.
What has shown to be particularly uncomfortable is a vehicle door apparatus that is used in Coupe vehicle chassis types specifically. In such an arrangement, vehicle doors extend considerably in the longitudinal direction of the vehicle, which makes it much more difficult for users who are in the sitting position inside the vehicle to close them. This is because the door actuation handle located on the inside of the vehicle door and through which the actuation force of the user is introduced to the vehicle door is often far away from the user when the vehicle door is open. The user must perform considerable contortions, depending on his body size, in order to reach the door actuation handle.
A proposed solution has been to equip the vehicle door with a door drive mechanism that can move the vehicle door from the open position in the direction of closing as part of a motorized closing process. The known vehicle door apparatus (US 2005/0277512 A1), upon which the invention is based shows just such a door drive mechanism, which allows for purely manual movement of the vehicle door in addition to motorized movement.
Indeed, the known vehicle door apparatus provides a high degree of user comfort with its associated method of motorized movement, since the user does not have to apply any actuation force during the closing process.
However, the implementation effort for the known vehicle door apparatus is considerable. The reason for this is first of all that high counter-torques occur during the closing process just before reaching the closed position, said torques arising due to the engagement between a vehicle door lock associated with the vehicle door and a lock catch associated with the vehicle chassis, as well as due to gasket counter-pressures.
With regard to the counter-torques mentioned above, in general a closure aid is used that takes over the movement of the vehicle door from a pre-closed position, which is located just before the closed position, to the closed position. In the process, this aid can be a drive mechanism of the latch bolt of the vehicle lock or a drive mechanism of the lock catch. The latter variation is explained in US 2005/0151379 A1.
Finally, a vehicle door apparatus is known (DE 100 23 259 B4) in which the automatic movement of the vehicle door is done on the one hand by the door drive mechanism and on the other by momentum shortly before reaching the closed position. Here, as well, the effort to implement is considerable.
In addition to the high design effort, in the known motorized closing process it is a disadvantage that there is always a certain amount of pinch danger present. The possibility of the user getting an arm or a leg in the pinch area is simply impossible to eliminate.